We Cannot Forget the Plurality of Pakistan

As Pakistanis, we are often handed a version of our history. In schools and homes, the dominant narrative is the "Pakistan Studies" version, which revolves around the supremacy of the two-nation theory.

Beyond our borders post-9/11, our identities, present and past, are tied to religion, extremism and terrorism. Both these histories violently flatten our lives and experiences. The book Towards Peoples’ Histories in Pakistan: (In)audible voices, Forgotten Pasts, edited by Asad Ali and Kamran Asdar Ali is a welcome step away from these singular narratives.

The book centres the “people” and their histories with their “plurality of lives” and “multiple renderings of the past”. Rather than featuring the voices of traditional historians with a desire to seek distance from their own experience, the book features the writings of historically minded anthropologists, sociologists, and political scientists. The editors hope that this book “will enable a renewed emphasis on the qualitative lived heterogeneous time of peoples in their multiplicity, variety, struggles, and self-conception”. This in and of itself makes the book an important read.

On the histories of the Left

Towards Peoples' Histories in Pakistan: (In)audible Voices, Forgotten Pasts (Critical Perspectives in South Asian History), edited by Asad Ali and Kamran Asdar Ali, Bloomsbury Academic, 2023.

For me, a political educator who works with progressive organisers and activists, chapters of the book that trace histories of the Left were particularly instructive.

Kamran Asdar Ali’s telling of the history of working-class politics in Karachi during the “long 1960s”, the zenith of progressive organising, shows us the role of state violence, the limits of progressive organising, and the competing ideological tendencies within the Left itself.

Anushay Malik and Hassan Javid’s chapter traces the rise and decline of Pakistan’s progressive movement through three critical turning points in Pakistan’s history – 1947, 1965, and 1971 – each of which shaped and limited the space for progressive politics. They take a life-writing approach featuring the life and struggle of B.M. Kutty, a Kerala-born trade unionist who fought for the rights of beedi makers and cargo loaders in 1950s, worked along with Mir Ghaus Buksh Bizenjo in Balochistan in early 1970s, and was engaged in the anti-dictatorship Movement for the Restoration of Democracy (MRD) during the 1980s.

Aasim Sajjad Akhtar’s chapter, further down the book, follows the lives and learnings of Zahoor Khan, Munir Comrade, and Yamin Rana, Left-wing political workers in the labor and student movements in Karachi during the 1970s with a goal “to foment a revolution through the three idealized subjects of tulba, mazdoor, aur kissan (student, worker, and peasant)”.

Their journeys reflect the broader ideological struggles within Pakistan’s Left and their attempts to transform themselves and society through revolutionary politics. 

These three chapters, most powerful when they speak about the lives of real people who devoted their lives to the struggle, remind us of some truths we know well, and some we may have forgotten. We know the violent repression of the Left began almost immediately after the formation of the Communist Party of Pakistan; and successive governments – whether they were military or civilian – suppressed Leftist activism through arrests, sedition charges, forced exile, bans, and torture under arrest. We know that despite dedicating their lives to the struggle, a number of Left activists ultimately confronted, and evolved through, the collapse of revolutionary movements in Pakistan and globally. What we may have forgotten is how even at its peak, the Left struggled with issues of class hierarchies, ethnic politics, internal ideological tensions, and the limits of labor mobilisation in a deeply militarised state. And yet, in the face of all that, resistance has continued and political wins have been achieved, like in the 1960s.  

Mahvish Ahmad, Hashim Bin Rashid, and Ahmed Salim’s chapter adds to this the role of hopeful solidarity. It chronicles the history of progressive papers, pamphlets, and underground distribution networks that sustained the Left in Pakistan. Progressive publications were often banned, confiscated, or forced to rebrand under alternate titles, and yet progressive ideas persisted – written and circulated in defiance of the state; often buying each other’s licenses and publishing each other’s work. The chapter features archival labor as a form of political resistance. It draws on Ahmed Salim’s collection of over 40,000 progressive materials, a lifelong effort of preserving Pakistan’s socialist intellectual heritage. This chapter is a hopeful reminder of how sharp and resilient political workers have been in this country, persisting in face of state violence.  

On what can be said and not said

The Spectral Wound, Nayanika Mookherjee.

A telling of “peoples’ histories in Pakistan” would not be complete without speaking of 1971. Nayanika Mookherjee speaks of an “apparent amnesia” in Pakistan – a strong sense of remembering what must not be narrated surrounding the violence of 1971​. The essay draws on long-term ethnographic research and her book The Spectral Wound, which documents the varied experiences of rape survivors in 1971.

It highlights the deliberate gaps in Pakistan’s national narrative and the ongoing struggle over historical truth, apology, and accountability. Dina Mahnaz Siddiqi critiques Bangladesh’s own official memory, which erases the Partition of British India and the complexity of Muslim migration to East Pakistan, in order to create a unified secular Bengali identity​.

The essay focuses on the plight of “stranded Pakistanis” (Biharis) – the Urdu-speaking community that remained in Bangladesh after 1971. Siddiqi highlights their statelessness, as neither Pakistan nor Bangladesh recognized their citizenship. She argues that the Bihari experience complicates dominant nationalist narratives in Bangladesh, urging scholars to focus on the silences, erasures, and contradictions embedded in the creation of national identities.

Naila Mahmood’s “Invisible Borderlines” explores the themes of  displacement and belonging through the story of Fazeelat, a Bengali woman who migrated to Karachi after the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation. Mahmood met her in Karachi in 2001, where she worked as domestic help, living a life of invisibility in precarious conditions like thousands of other Bengali migrants. After years of struggling in Pakistan as an unrecognized migrant, Fazeelat returned to Bangladesh, only to die ten months later. 

These chapters show how 1971 lives on in the bodies, memories, and fates of all of us, but specially those displaced and left behind, those seeking and denying accountability. 1971 is not just about division of a country or liberation of a people, but about silences and the ongoing legacies of war, trauma, and statelessness in South Asia​.

“How is it possible to commemorate a wound that cannot be named?” Mookherjee asks.

These chapters are hard on the heart. Fazeelat’s story, the solace she felt on her tattered prayer mat, and her simple desire to return home – without even knowing what that home is now, made me put down the book in tears. And yet, we must name. The telling is justice itself.

People Power

Resistance can take many forms, freeing us from the burden of the one “right way”. Farida Shaheed’s chapter examines how the Women’s Action Forum (WAF) challenged the cultural hegemony of the Zia regime. Shaheed describes WAF’s activism as a “productive failure” - while it did not bring about a revolutionary transformation, it successfully resisted the erosion of women’s rights, inserted gender issues into the national political discourse, and mobilised opposition despite a deeply patriarchal and authoritarian context. WAF comes under significant criticism to this day for its “elite” leadership and inability to create an intersectional movement.

In that context, Shaheed’s analysis, and recounting of WAF’s wins, reminds us of the importance of the struggle itself. The means is the end. We respond the best we can each day. And in the courts of history, we lose some and we win some, but at the end of it all, we acted. We did the best we could. We did not stay quiet. 

A core belief of many of us in politics is that we need to curate spaces for counter histories and narratives to emerge and exist. Claire Pamment’s chapter situates “Teesri Dhun”, a collaborative performance project that aimed to co-create knowledge with the khwaja sira-trans communities through embodied storytelling, as an intervention to counter the framing of khwaja sira-trans communities as "backward" or in need of "rescue". Through laughter, dance, and satire, Teesri Dhun asserts their presence and power in the present, showing that performance is not simply a site of cultural memory but an ongoing act of defiance and world-making.

Sometimes as political workers we may feel (wrongly of course) that the burden of “leading” change rests on us; when in fact alternate narratives of agency are being consistently created all around us. The chapter that inspired this insight was Amen Jaffer’s exploration of how Sufi shrines in Pakistan serve as sites for alternative histories to exist and evolve, and where storytelling and ritual practices cultivate a temporality distinct from the linear, state-centric historiography. Through the example of Khawaja Bihari’s shrine in Lahore, Jaffer argues that Sufi spaces enable marginalised communities to author their own histories by weaving together personal narratives, miracles, and communal memory.

Stepping away and looking 

Jaffer’s chapter invited me to pause and look. Just look. To look at all the things that are hiding in plain view. A number of other chapters did the same. Adeem Suhail’s chapter challenges the masculinist and statist framing of Baloch history, by focusing on two Baloch women whose lives disrupt the state’s (and many of ours) expected narratives of Baloch struggle. Azra Bibi, daughter of a community patriarch in Lyari, Karachi, pioneered Lyari’s JhatPat Market, a thriving women-led commercial space that disrupted the male-dominated public sphere​. Babli Baloch, an Afro-Baloch activist, navigated the complex political networks of Karachi’s Lyari neighbourhood, working in public health and community organising, yet remained invisible in dominant archives​. Instead of participating in armed resistance, their labor, kinship ties, and social contributions sustain Baloch lifeworlds in ways that are historically unrecognised​. 

Omar Kasmani’s work challenges dominant historical narratives that erase non-normative identities and desires, exploring queerness through two seemingly disparate scenes: poetry of Pakistani-American gay poet Iftikhar Nasim (Ifti) and Shi‘i-religious lyricism at the shrine of Sehwan Sharif in Sindh. He argues that queerness in Pakistan is not always explicit but can be read through different registers – lyrical, spiritual, and affective. Humeira Iqtidar’s writing critiques liberal tolerance in Pakistan, arguing that it simultaneously includes and marginalises communities, enabling both state and social violence. Using the 2013 Joseph Colony arson as a case study, she reveals how economic, political, and ethnic tensions shaped the attack, rather than just religious intolerance. She argues that liberal tolerance enforces a narrow vision of “the people”, excluding those who do not fit state-defined norms.

Humanising gods

Asad Ali’s chapter explores the affective dimensions of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s political appeal, particularly among the jiyalay – the fervent supporters of the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP). It emphasises how ordinary people co-produced Bhuttoism as a political subjectivity of equality, dignity, and defiance against authoritarianism. By centring the lived experiences of early PPP activists, it disrupts state-centric and institutional accounts, and reinterprets Bhutto’s charisma not as an innate personal trait but as a co-produced political phenomenon, sustained by the jiyalay’s unwavering commitment. Ali acknowledges the paradox of Bhutto’s legacy – his populist appeal coexisted with authoritarian tendencies, as seen in his suppression of political dissent.

In conclusion, it can be said that while the opening chapters may read a tad academic for a practitioner, the book eases into a telling of history that is accessible and kind to all kinds of readers. The effort to bring in a diversity of voices, experiences, and expressions, gives a richness to the book and keeps it interesting. 

Some chapters of this book, especially where they connect to the stories of the humans that lived these histories, provoke emotions of sadness and anger, and of inspiration and strength. Some bring a smile to the face. Some make one pause and acknowledge the many ways humans find agency and continue on with strength. Some analyse the past to help us inform strategies for the future. Some flip the script. Some demystify the -isms of politics. What sat uncomfortably with me from time to time though was the process by which we are deciding who the ‘people’ are who merit mention. Who is left behind? How much of our lenses of looking at “people” is shaped by where we sit in the world?  

In Pakistan, we need a deeper exploration of what it means to be organising now, at a time when a whole generation has grown up with little knowledge of histories of resistance. It is in this context that books like this hold a special meaning and place. It locates ongoing struggles in a longer arc of history. It grounds us. It connects us to the lives of many that have lived and breathed, given costs for freedom and celebrated the joys of freedom, over time.

Noorulain Masood is an educator, writer, and practitioner working at the intersection of movement building, feminist leadership, and community-led systems change. She founded CSIDC, a women-led organisation based in Pakistan with global reach, which creates learning spaces for organisers to reflect, strategise, and lead with purpose. Drawing on frameworks she taught at Harvard, Noor’s work brings a Global South perspective to global conversations on power, leadership, and justice.

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